Fay Weldon Quotes

#1. Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start.

Adam Phillips

#2. Writing is more than just the making of a series of comprehensible statements: it is the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic.

Fay Weldon

#3. I just want not to be hurt by him. I want it to be like it was when I was a child, when you thought the day you got married you lived happily ever after.

Fay Weldon

#4. Getting two sentences together is exhilarating. It is heaven.

Fay Weldon

#5. If you put a woman in a man's position, she will be more efficient, but no more kind.

Fay Weldon

#6. It became obvious that you had to be a feminist because it was such a ridiculous state of affairs.

Fay Weldon

#7. I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books.

Fay Weldon

#8. I like sex. I've had feedback but men will feed you back anything, won't they?

Fay Weldon

#9. Some women are born mothers, some women become mothers, and some have motherhood thrust upon them. I struggled against it all my life, but I think the truth is I was probably born to it. I don't do badly, I don't do well, I just do it.

Fay Weldon

#10. I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes.

Fay Weldon

#11. My experience of men in cars has always been that if you don't want them to do something, they will. It is when they are behind a wheel that they most fear the control of women and children.

Fay Weldon

#12. There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them.

Fay Weldon

#13. You don't go to church for intellectual gratification - you go because it pleases your aesthetic sensibilities.

Fay Weldon

#14. Food. Drink. Sleep. Books. They are all drugs.

Fay Weldon

#15. Nowadays most people wear black most of the time anyway: go to a literary party and one would imagine everyone there was in perpetual mourning for their lives.

Fay Weldon

#16. Else to go Felicity sits down upon the steps to consider

Fay Weldon

#17. If I am a prolific writer and turn my hand, with what seems to some as indecent haste, from novels to screenplays to stage and radio plays, it is because there is so much to be said, so few of us to say it, and time runs out.

Fay Weldon

#18. People give us credit only for what we ourselves believe.

Fay Weldon

#19. Widows tend either to fade away when husbands die, committing emotional suttee, or else find that a new life burgeons. Here in Christchurch, a lot of burgeoning goes on.

Fay Weldon

#20. Idle, profligate, ingrate. No one decent could ever want him.

Fay Weldon

#21. Ruby once told Margaret that Ben was an accident, but it wasn't true. The house just felt empty without a baby in it. Good God, why do women have such feelings: and worse, having them, why do they then act upon them?

Fay Weldon

#22. Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged!

Fay Weldon

#23. I don't know what I want but it's not this. I don't want to be this person, I don't want to be trapped in this body, in this house, in this marriage.fay we

Fay Weldon

#24. For who ever lived totally as they wanted to; who ever, if they have time to think about it, dies wholly satisfied? And those who remain know it.

Fay Weldon

#25. I'd have apple pie. You break through the crust and it's juicy underneath.

Fay Weldon

#26. Was this what she had shattered convention for; broken with her family, her friends? Everything she had ever known; doomed herself to eternal damnation, for the sake of what she had believed would be heaven on earth, and had turned out to be hell, here and now?

Fay Weldon

#27. This is my home now. I like it. Nothing happens here. I know what to expect from one day to the next. I can control everything, and I can eat. I like eating.

Fay Weldon

#28. No one could be more happy than a man who has never known affliction.

Fay Weldon

#29. So much for the fruits of love. Love? What's love? Sex, ah, that's another thing. Love has babies: sex has abortions.

Fay Weldon

#30. When today's young woman says she isn't a feminist what she means is she isn't a lesbian and she doesn't hate men, she likes to wear make-up and she enjoys a laugh. In which she is no different from many an early feminist.

Fay Weldon

#31. Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth; left to itself, it sweeps in like the tide.

Fay Weldon

#32. What makes women happy? Nothing, for more than ten minutes at a time, so stop worrying.

Fay Weldon

#33. I am not cynical. I am just old. I know what is going to happen next.

Fay Weldon

#34. Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity.

Fay Weldon

#35. Food is the supremest of pleasures.

Fay Weldon

#36. guilt to motherhood is like grapes to wine

Fay Weldon

#37. Books fashion nets to sustain and support the reader as he falls helplessly through the chaos of his own existence.

Fay Weldon

#38. Take me! Well, not quite take me, love me now, take me eventually

Fay Weldon

#39. Young women especially have something invested in being nice people, and it's only when you have children that you realise you're not a nice person at all, but generally a selfish bully.

Fay Weldon

#40. If that was dying, I don't want to do it again.

Fay Weldon

#41. There is nothing, she would think, more delicious that the icing of bought chocolate cake, eaten in the silence and privacy of the night.

Fay Weldon

#42. If infinity is as they describe it, all things are not just possible but in the end certain ...

Fay Weldon

#43. Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.

Fay Weldon

#44. A 'weakness,' I now realize, is nothing but a strength not properly developed.

Fay Weldon

#45. Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely, ot waste too much energy on other peoples' woes, in case the present dissolves altogether.

Fay Weldon

#46. Pride is what you can afford or think you can afford.

Fay Weldon

#47. Marriage is what happens when one at least of the partners doesn't want the other to get away.

Fay Weldon

#48. One friend dies and we remain indifferent; another dies, perhaps less intimate, and we see ourselves as dead, and weep, mourn, tear our hair or find ourselves caught up in the madness of the wake, competing with others as to who was closest, now suffers most.

Fay Weldon

#49. Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest.

Fay Weldon

#50. Instinct' usually just means our conditioning to believe this or believe that, without thinking to investigate.

Fay Weldon

#51. Marriage is a very difficult relationship for nearly everyone and I'm sure you shouldn't do it if you want a quiet little easy life.

Fay Weldon

#52. It is the memory of past happiness that makes the present so intolerable.

Fay Weldon

#53. Beauty is the first present nature gives to women and the first it takes away.

Fay Weldon

#54. Man seems not so much wicked as frail, unable to face pain, trouble and growing old. A good woman knows that nature is her enemy. Look at what it does to her.

Fay Weldon

#55. I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.

Fay Weldon

#56. You will find that women who are pregnant often don't want to be and women who aren't desperately envy those who are. Labour wards are always full of very punitive people.

Fay Weldon

#57. Every time you open your wardrobe, you look at your clothes and you wonder what you are going to wear. What you are really saying is 'Who am I going to be today?

Fay Weldon

#58. I like the dry-cleaners. I like the sense of refreshment and renewal. I like the way dirty old torn clothes are dumped, to be returned clean and wholesome in their slippery transparent cases. Better than confesssion any day. Here there is a true sense of rebirth, redemption, salvation.

Fay Weldon

#59. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

Fay Weldon

#60. I wonder if my shrink (sorry, psychiatrist) was a woman not a man I'd be in a better or worse state?

Fay Weldon

#61. Fortunately, there is more to life than death. There is for one thing, fiction. A thousand thousand characters to be sent marching out into the world to divert time from its forward gallop to the terrible horizon.

Fay Weldon

#62. I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day.

Fay Weldon

#63. A woman has all too much substance in a man's eyes at the best of times. That is why men like women to be slim. Her lack of flesh negates her. The less of her there is, the less notice he need take of her. The more like a male she appears to be, the safer he feels.

Fay Weldon

#64. There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.

Fay Weldon

#65. One sort of believes in recycling. But one believes in it as a kind of palliative to the gods.

Fay Weldon

#66. There was no such thing as defeat if you didn't accept it.

Fay Weldon

#67. Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good.

Fay Weldon

#68. Of course you have to believe in destiny; that everything is sheer chance is an intolerable notion.

Fay Weldon

#69. Ambition will, and should, always outstrip achievement.

Fay Weldon

#70. So treasure your moments of happiness, the glimpses you see of truth, the nights you've been loved. That's all you've got.

Fay Weldon

#71. Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning ...

Fay Weldon

#72. I need men to define me: to give me an idea of what I am. If I didn't have boyfriends I don't think I would exist. I would fly apart in all directions. So I must live my life in perpetual pain, if I want to live at all.

Fay Weldon

#73. By and large, nothing is as bad as you fear, or as good as you hope.

Fay Weldon

#74. She drank sweet coffee, sweet tea, sweet cocoa and sweet sherry.

Fay Weldon

#75. During the day she would read science fiction novels. In the evenings she watched television. And she ate, and ate, and drank, and ate.

Fay Weldon

#76. Writers are always a great nuisance to publishers. If they could do without them, they would.

Fay Weldon

#77. You shouldn't keep other people's phallic symbols on the mantelpiece.

Fay Weldon

#78. The prophets of doom, in my experience, are generally ignored and usually right.

Fay Weldon

#79. I was seduced by secrets, which are to true love as artificial sweetener is to sugar, calorie-free but in the long run carcinogenic, not the real thing, and only a peculiar aftertaste in the mouth to tell you so, to warn you.

Fay Weldon

#80. We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the destination.

Fay Weldon

#81. Writers were never meant to be professionals. Writing is not a profession, it is an activity, an essentially amateur occupation. It is what you do when you are not living.

Fay Weldon

#82. Memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.

Fay Weldon

#83. People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.

Fay Weldon

#84. Loving is upsetting. That's the point of it.

Fay Weldon

#85. I think it's important to go (to church every Sunday) and sit and think about something other than yourself, pray for the sick, consider the dead.

Fay Weldon

#86. The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself ... They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

Fay Weldon

#87. Men are irrelevant.

Fay Weldon

#88. People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an Order of the British Empire goes on for ever.

Fay Weldon

#89. The desire for self-expression afflicts people when they feel there is something of themselves which is not getting through to the outside world.

Fay Weldon

#90. To the happy all things come: happiness can even bring the dead back to life. It is our resentments, our dreariness, our hate and envy, unrecognized by us, which keeps us miserable. Yet these things are in our heads, not out of our hands; we own them. We can throw them out if we choose.

Fay Weldon

#91. How has anyone ever understood anyone, except through love, which is wordless?

Fay Weldon

#92. Whore,' he cried. Well, she was not his wife, yet she slept with him. She lived in sin. What else but a whore did that make her; and what did her whoredom make of Ben?

Fay Weldon

#93. Prudence says one thing, desire says another, and I'd rather go with desire any time.

Fay Weldon

#94. The more you want the more you suffer. If you want everything you must suffere everything.

Fay Weldon

#95. Poverty is a stubborn thing: you seldom escape it with one bound.

Fay Weldon

#96. All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.

Fay Weldon

#97. As it has turned out, the whole relationship between men, women and children has tilted, to the disadvantage of women.

Fay Weldon

#98. One must be careful with words. Words turn probabilities into facts and by sheer force of
definition translate tendencies into habits.

Fay Weldon

#99. Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens.

Fay Weldon

#100. The peculiar need to write is increased, it seems, rather than allayed with practice.

Fay Weldon